Blog : innovation

Stuck in a digital rut? Doing a lot but seeing no results? Not sure where to start with digital? Here are six tips on how to make progress quickly.

Time is of the essence when it comes to meeting the digital challenge. Finding the balance between acting quickly and planning effectively is key.

Doing nothing is not an option but nor is it advisable to rush into action without a strategic approach. But that approach needs to be based on a whole-of-business strategy for the digital world, not on a stand-alone digital strategy. The difference is important.

Digital can be defined as a ‘culture of connectedness’. To succeed, businesses need to plug themselves into this new culture and learn how to operate within it. The shift is so significant you need more than just an add-on to the way your business currently operates.

Responding to the digital revolution requires some revolutionary thinking:

1. Get used to working without the full picture

Things move fast in the digital world. While you need to work strategically, taking too long to develop a strategy risks it being out of date before you even start executing.

To paraphrase Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, you need to learn to work with 70 percent of the information. Being wrong may be less costly than you think, he says, but being slow will definitely be expensive.

The key question is: “What is the minimum we need to know to move forward?” Not all businesses are comfortable taking this approach but the ones who make progress will ultimately be those who learn to live with a little uncertainty.

2. Failure is an option

Working with less information means you’ll sometimes get things wrong. In fact, if you’re not failing occasionally, you’re probably not pushing boundaries enough. But that’s not the same as being reckless and you can mitigate the risks in various ways.

Use low-cost, controlled experiments to learn without exposing your business to financial risk. And you can mitigate any reputational risk from getting it wrong by being open and transparent about your process. People have a far greater willingness to accept imperfection if they are aware that they’re participating in a process that will lead to improvement.

3. Listen to your customers

It barely needs saying, but remind yourself regularly anyway – digital is a customer-centric medium. Everything you do as a business needs to be done with a view to the customer’s needs and expectations.

The biggest shift for businesses when it comes to communication is the change from a broadcast model to a conversation model. It is no longer acceptable to simply push messages out.

Your customers will tell you what they want from you in the digital world but you have to be listening. Ideally, you’ll get to understand what they need at each stage of their journey with your business. Customer expectations are constantly changing so an ongoing dialogue is essential to stay on top of this.

4. Test, learn – then test again

Combine the minimum knowledge you need to move forward with a customer-centric approach: act quickly to test early iterations of strategic thinking with actual customers, collect real data and feedback, and refine your approach. This iterative process should be continuous – it’s a virtuous circle, not a linear path.

5. Get everyone paddling in the same direction

Research proves that successful digital initiatives depend on leadership from Board and senior management but they can also be a leap for middle management. A lot of initiatives die when middle management doesn’t get on board.

If your internal culture is not geared to delivering good digital, the outputs are not going to be great. It may be that your first priority is to focus on getting your internal processes right – encouraging collaboration by establishing internal centres of digital excellence and cross-functional teams that work together on solving problems.

6. Above all – do something

A recent US survey indicated 83% of executives realise the need for digital transformation in their businesses but only 23% are actively doing something about it. The rules of evolution apply – adapt or die.

Given the rapid evolution of customer behaviours and digital technologies, the first issue we wanted to address was: how do you get the industry, business and customer information you need, without taking months to get it?

The answer is: you don’t. You don’t try to get the full picture. Instead, decide “what is the minimum you need to know to move forward?”

This gets to the heart of good strategy – the ability to make hard choices and prioritise one area of focus over another.

If your organisation is stuck in a digital rut, or suffering paralysis by analysis, then by learning to work with incomplete information, you will be compelled to get out of the blocks and begin making progress.

“An organisation’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage”

— Jack Welch

2. Useful information, quickly

Imagine you’re a commander on a battlefield. You’ve prepared a strategy, and a set of tactics, that you believe have the best chance of defeating the enemy. You have one shot to get it right – success or failure, glory or defeat.

Now, imagine if you could test multiple different strategic ideas against the enemy, before committing your troops to the battlefield. Imagine if you could mount a series of guerilla raids that glean a mountain of useful insight, without great cost or sacrifice, and without revealing your position. What advantages might that provide when the time comes to say ‘Charge!’?

With Rapid Strategy, you can.

At the heart of our approach, is the use of quick, cheap and discreet experiments to test business assumptions.

Used this way, assumptions become powerful tools for business learning. When we ask the question, ‘what is the minimum we need to know to move forward?’, an assumption is often the starting point. Using this as our minimum, we can test and challenge it, to ensure we move forward with reliable information.

“Invest in experiments to quickly, cheaply and easily gain insight into solving problems and exploiting opportunities.”

– Michael Schrage, The Innovator’s Hypothesis

From these results, serious strategic decisions, and tactical refinements, can be made more quickly, and oftentimes with greater certainty, than using traditional methods.

3. Agile execution, bespoke teams

A strategy is not a strategy without a plan of action. Execution has always been critical to success, but as the line between strategy and tactics becomes increasingly blurred, this becomes even more true.

It is always more helpful to see a strategy in action, than to see it as a theory on the page. If agile talks about ‘working software’, we talk about ‘working strategy’.

Rapid Strategy advocates for this approach; short, rapid phases of execution, building on the stages before it, and accumulating to deliver a larger piece of work.

We deliver this via a partnership model, assembling and managing bespoke teams of trusted experts around your project. This ensures the appropriate fit and capability, in turn delivering optimal value.

We strongly believe that Rapid Strategy will deliver greater digital clarity, value and performance to your business. If these sound like results you would be interested in, please do contact us.

Innovation is one of those buzzwords that gets bandied around a lot – too much if you ask me – and is far more easily said than done.

This week, I was fortunate to spend half an hour talking innovation with Tim Kastelle, Associate Professor of Innovation and Evolutionary Economics at the University of Queensland.

Since graduating from Princeton, Tim has become recognised as one of Australasia’s foremost thinkers in innovation. If you’re interested in the area, I’d highly recommend taking a look at his blog at http://timkastelle.org.

Here are a few key outtakes from our conversation:

Innovation can be defined as “executing new ideas to create value”. The key words here are ‘executing’ and ‘create value’. Innovation is not just the creation of ideas, they must be put into practice. Equally, these ideas need to provide a tangible benefit.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a key part of the innovation process. Think of MVP as a means of learning.

When implementing innovation, C-level execs often recognise how innovation may lead to growth, and customers can see the problems innovation would resolve. The challenge is often convincing middle management of the value.

Innovation within a business is very much a cultural thing. You need 10% of employees to buy into a change to make it happen.

Startups: at about 20 employees, innovation breaks as the company becomes systematized. A culture of innovation is required to maintain momentum.